Review – The Guardian
This image,
featured in The Guardian art and design web page, looks like an innocent set of
stairs until you read that these steps led down to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. As Simon Norfolk writes, it looks like the stairs
were more worn on the right hand side than the left as the right hand side was
considered the down side. I must admit
to me that the left hand side is more worn and that would mean to me that more
people travelled away from the chambers that walked towards them.
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| © Simon Norfolk/Michael Hoppen Gallery |
This image is a good example of converging verticals with no
other connotation until you read the attached article. This turns the whole picture into one that
gives a macabre meaning. Simon mentions
that Barthes talks about quote: the punctum: the crucial, often accidental,
detail of a photograph that reveals something deeper. I have always taken this to mean that there
is something like a focal point to a picture but this image doesn’t actually have
one but the way the light highlights on the stairs allows the eye to travel up the
left hand side and down the right side. Altogether
an historic image but also one that is a record of the atrocities that man does
to man.
